Sister trying to find out what one of her kids are using internet for (going over the datacap). Could people recommend a wireless router i can get that is good for something like wrt or tomato so i just run bandwidth monitor on it.

hio77: Without going into any form of deep packet inspection, or monitoring based on ports (which isnt accurate anyway) a router cant tell you that the data is being used by X Service.

narrowing it down to a certain member in the house is possible depending on implementation however...

if the household is large enough, would moving to an unlimited connection not be a better option than going on a witch hunt however?

a simple steam game could easily be 20GB+ a decent quality youtube video could easily be a GB or so a pop.

What i may of not explained myself. Looking for a router that allows my sister to monitor bandwidth usages, that is all, a simple chart showing MAC address/IP Address and how much data has been used within 30+ days. Thinking a WRT or Tomato Router asking here for some ideas.

We have Tomato 1.28 running.I can look at data totals per IP on a daily basis (periodically saved to a USB drive for persistence). I map static IPs so I know how much data a specific node is using.However, these are just overall totals. There is web log, which you could use to determine surfing behaviour.

For more fine grained analysis I think you'd either need a more expensive switch or setup a transparent bridge of your own for capturing traffic (not as hard as you think).

zaptor: We have Tomato 1.28 running.I can look at data totals per IP on a daily basis (periodically saved to a USB drive for persistence). I map static IPs so I know how much data a specific node is using.However, these are just overall totals. There is web log, which you could use to determine surfing behaviour.

For more fine grained analysis I think you'd either need a more expensive switch or setup a transparent bridge of your own for capturing traffic (not as hard as you think).

Agreeing with zaptor for daily totals.

I set this up for a friend using Tomato, specifically Shibby's version, on a Netgear WNR3500L.

Tomato has a wide range of supported routers (just be careful of the specific versions, e.g. it runs on a E4200v1 but not an E4200v2)